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YOUR PEOPLE AND MY PEOPLE ARE DOWNTOWN BIRMINGHAM
My friend, the late Marie Stokes Jemison, always had the same thing to say when she met somebody new, “And who are your people?”
Marie recognized that everybody was connected to everybody else. She just wanted to know exactly how.
When I drive around on this side of what we in Birmingham call The Mountain, I can’t help noticing how connected everybody is, and how every thing, even though inanimate, is connected to everybody, every living thing.
That philosopher guy, Emerson, said, “There is no such thing as history. There is only biography.” If you don’t believe it, try looking at a historic Downtown Birmingham structure without connecting it to somebody, lots of somebodies, as a matter of fact.
For the past 45 years, each time I pass by a certain building on Highland Avenue, I remember my father. Even though the building has been face-lifted and revived several times over the decades, one thing cannot be changed: my father helped build that building. And it is that fact alone that makes me realize how people-connected all the Downtown buildings are.
My father was a construction supervisor way back when, and his project was to build that building, and build it he did–with the help and companionship of a great diversity of people. Each brick in that building is engraved (but only in my mind) with the names of all the people who dreamed the building, who made the dream come true, all the people whose scraped knuckles and bruised fingers and dusty palms and stretched sinews made that dream come to life, made it last, down all the years.
Even one day in the future, when that building comes down, when that building is replaced with a new dream by a new diversity of minds and muscles, the essence of that structure will remain, as long as I and all the relatives and friends of those red-brick names remember…
We all come from red clay and will return to some version of it. But in the in-between period, it’s good and right to recall the people who made Downtown come alive, who nurtured it for a while, who treated it with respect, who infused their dreams into its girders and bricks and planks and asphalt.
Become a tourist for a few minutes. Cruise Downtown. Look at the buildings. Look beyond, at the friendly ghosts who remain a presence here.
Don’t forget to wave and smile and nod
© Jim Reed 2014 A.D.